Word: salvadors
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...middle-aged businessman, a scion of one of El Salvador's oldest families, was impatient. He had been waiting a day and a half for his plantation foreman to report the results of a highly sensitive negotiation. Finally, the telephone rang with the news. The foreman had got in touch with El Salvador's Marxist-led guerrillas to discuss wages for the migrant farm laborers whom the cafetalero needed during the 2 1/2-month coffee harvest. The guerrillas' demand on behalf of the workers: about $4 for each 100 lbs. of coffee beans picked, plus food and medical care. The rebels...
Similar under-the-table transactions have been taking place in recent weeks all over central and eastern El Salvador as the harvest of the country's biggest cash crop got under way. Despite the bitter enmity between Salvadoran landowners and the Liberation Front, the coffee harvest is a time when the two sides find good use for each other. This year the interdependence appears to be greater than ever. Says a lawyer in the central department of Usulutan: "Everybody is making deals with the guerrillas." The reason, he explains, is that "the guerrillas are stronger. Their presence is being accepted...
Indeed, it is the damage done by El Salvador's five-year civil war that has produced the strange bedfellows. Traditionally, coffee has provided more than 50% of the country's export revenues. It still does, but since 1980 income from coffee has shrunk, from more than $615 million to $403 million. This year bountiful rains promise a slight reversal of the trend. At current world prices, the Salvadoran coffee harvest could bring in as much as $410 million in desperately needed foreign exchange. Because roughly 25% of the crop is grown in areas contested or controlled by the guerrillas...
...Last November the rebels began distributing leaflets in one of their mountainous northern strongholds, Chalatenango department, urging local peasants who travel south for the coffee harvest to band together for negotiating purposes. At about the same time, a full-page advertisement appeared in a newspaper in the capital, San Salvador, putting forth wage and working demands. The advertisement was signed by two mysterious organizations previously unknown in Salvadoran labor circles, the National Association of Campesinos and the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives. The ad campaign appeared at a time when El Salvador's National Assembly was setting minimum wages...
...tradition of violence that is as old as the country. "The blood of dead peasants has not dried, time does not dry it, rain does not erase it from the roads," the poet Pablo Neruda once wrote. "A bloody flavor soaks the land, the bread and wine in Salvador." Duarte, slowly, cautiously, is trying to cleanse his land...